APEX

I got a nasty shock this morning when I fired up my local Application Expression installation.

It had been working fine and all of a sudden…just dead. I sounded like all of those family members that as I.T practitioners we have to deal with (and that we’re so sceptical of) when they say: “I didn’t change anything…it just stopped!”

In keeping with the treatment of family members, I then adopted the advice that I normally give them first.

As always, you should read the Installation/Upgrade manual from top to bottom before upgrading any piece of software, and be aware of all of the pre-requisites and processes. But for me, my Application Express 18.2 upgrade was as simple as:

Last year, I flexed my technology muscles by building on the fine ground work of Lucas Jellema in using some Node, some REST, and some JSON to extract the full Oracle Openworld speaker catalogue, and then added some JSON parsing in the database, some SQL and slapped a nice helping on Application Express on top of it all, to end up with an Application Express rendition of the Oracle Openworld speaker catalogue.

Four years ago I wrote about a little volunteer project that my partner did. A small association that provided outdoor experiences and facilities for kids with physical impairments needed a system to record member and volunteer details, plus a few other bits and pieces. We built an Apex solution running on XE. This week, they became part of a larger government initiative, and thus their Apex application was no longer needed and the information migrated to a centralised service. There was a tinge of sadness about that, but I also was pleased with the outcomes of this “project” namely:

It’s been over a decade since I first heard Tom Kyte talking about Project Marvel, which eventually became Application Express (APEX). Since then I’ve “used” just about every version of APEX. I use the term “used” very loosely, because I typically use APEX for a few days to get a job done, then never touch it again for months. By the time I come back, I pretty much have to start the learning process from the beginning again.

APEX 5.0.2 was released just before OOW15. Today is my first day back to work, so I’ve started to patch some stuff. We were already on APEX 5.0.1 across the board, so we didn’t need to do any full installations, just patches.

SO far, so good. No problems in any Dev or Test databases. I expect a pretty quick roll-out across the board.

Seamless cloning of an application stack is an outstanding goal. Seamless cloning of an application stack including the full production database, application server, and webserver in a few minutes with next to zero disk space used or configuration required is the best goal since Alexander Graham Bell decided he wanted a better way tell Mr. Watson to “come here.”